This won’t come as a shock to anyone, but the teams aren’t as concerned about each other’s pace as you might think. With only three days of testing to understand their cars before the first race, there is only a limited amount of time that can be spent trying to build a picture of the pecking order.
“We have some really good tools that we use to try to understand people’s general pace, based on their car speed and things like that in general,” says Alpine technical director Matt Harman. “But it’s not something we focus too much on, at the end of the day we can’t affect their performance, we can only affect ours.
“So we spend a little bit of time looking and making sure that maybe we’ve understood what they’re doing and why they’re doing it rather than their absolute performance.”
And Esteban Ocon agrees with this assessment: “For sure we continue, or we start looking at the other cars. I started having a good look at them all on the grid, seeing the difference between the cars is pretty impressive.
“On the third day you start to have an idea. exactly? No. You never know if people are pushing or not. But we’re starting to have a better idea, yes.”
Oh, and it looks like teams are sending personnel to the track with new parts in their luggage. “We want a lot of parts,” adds Harman. “I was lucky enough to have some with me when I came, which was great. Unfortunately, it was oversized luggage. It took me an hour at the airport!”
can you imagine “Unofficial, I didn’t pack that huge carbon fiber wing…”
